Walter Duranty

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Walter Duranty

Walter Duranty (1884–October 3, 1957) was a Liverpool-born British journalist who served as the New York Times Moscow bureau chief from 1922 through 1936. Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for a set of stories written in 1931 on Joseph Stalin's Five-Year Plan to industrialize the Soviet Union. Duranty's reporting has fallen into disrepute primarily because of his reports denying the famine in Ukraine. He has also been criticized in hindsight for his favorable portrayals of Stalin and his uncritical coverage of Stalin's show trials—however, Stalin was generally respected at the time and into World War II.

Because of controversy over his statements with regard to famine in Ukraine, various parties have advocated Duranty be symbolically stripped of his Pulitzer Prize of 1932, the year the famine began. The Times commissioned a report in 2003 which recommended that Duranty's Pulitzer Prize be revoked. The Pulitzer Board ultimately declined to do so, concluding that while Duranty's work fell far short of "today's standards for foreign reporting," there was "no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception." This unsubstantiated assertion has been disproven. Nevertheless, Duranty's reports in the Times of 1933 regarding no famine in Ukraine "today" are most widely cited as intentional lies.

Early career

After finishing college, Duranty moved to Paris. During the First World War, he avoided military service through his job as a reporter. During his time in Paris he formed a personal and sexual liaison with the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, assisting Crowley with his Paris Working series of sex magic rituals. In 1919, he gained initial notice from a story about the Paris Peace Conference. He then moved to Riga to cover events in the newly independent Baltic States.

Career in Moscow

Duranty moved to Soviet Russia in 1921. He was sent there to revive the reputation of the Times in Moscow; the paper, like much of the Western press, had erroneously reported the regime's collapse or imminent collapse on several occasions. This faulty reporting was due to the absence of Western reporters in Soviet Russia.

While traveling by train from Paris to Le Havre during a holiday from Moscow in 1924, Duranty's left leg was injured in a train wreck. After he was initially operated on, the surgeon discovered gangrene in the leg, and the leg was removed. After recovery, Duranty continued his career as a journalist in the Soviet Union. In 1929, he was granted an exclusive interview with Joseph Stalin which enhanced his reputation. Duranty was to remain in Moscow for twelve years, returning to the United States in 1934. Thereafter he remained on retainer for The New York Times, which required him to spend several months a year in Moscow. In this capacity he reported on the show trials of the later 1930s.

Views on the Soviet Union

In the reporting that won him the Pulitzer Prize, Duranty held that the Russian people were "Asiatic" in thought. That meant to him that they valued communal effort and required autocratic government. In his view, individuality and private enterprise were alien concepts to the Russian people which only led to social disruption, and were unacceptable to them just as tyranny and Communism were unacceptable to Westerners. Attempts since the time of Peter the Great to apply Western ideals in Russia were a failed form of European Colonialism that had been finally swept away by the 1917 Revolution. Lenin and his New Economic Policy were both failures tainted by western thought. Duranty saw Stalin as getting rid of the New Economic Policy because he had no political competition. The famine demonstrated the lack of organized opposition to Stalin, because his position was never truly threatened by the catastrophe; Stalin's purges surely contributed to this political vacuum. Stalin did what Lenin could only try to do, “re-established a dictator of the imperial idea and put himself in charge” with means of intimidation. “Stalin didn’t look upon himself as a dictator, but as a ‘guardian of a sacred flame’ that he called Stalinism for lack of a better name.” (Walter Duranty, Duranty Reports Russia (New York: Viking Press, 1934). Stalin’s five-year plan was an attempt to effect a new way of life for the Russian people.

Duranty argued that the Soviet Union’s mentality in 1931 greatly differed from the perception created by Marxist ideas. Duranty claimed “It would be more proper to refer to the principle present during the period of Stalin’s reign as Stalinism.” (Walter Duranty, Duranty Reports Russia (New York: Viking Press, 1934),238. Stalinism in Duranty’s view is a progression and integration of Marxism combined with Leninism. In a June 24, 1931 article in the New York Times, Duranty gives his views of the Soviet actions in the countryside that eventually led to the famine in Ukraine. He asserted that the kulaks, i.e. the rich peasants who opposed the collectivization of farming had been an "almost privileged class" under Lenin. He said that just as the Bolsheviks had eliminated the former ruling class of the Czarist regime, so would the same fate now befall the kulaks, whom he numbered at 5,000,000. They would be "dispossessed, dispersed, demolished". He compared Stalin's logic in the matter to that of the Biblical Prophet Samuel or Tamerlane. He said that these people were to be "'liquidated' or melted in the hot fire of exile and labor into the proletarian mass". Duranty claimed that individuals being sent to the Siberian labor camps were given a choice between rejoining Soviet society and becoming underprivileged outsiders. However, he also said that for those who could not accept the system, "the final fate of such enemies is death.". Duranty, though describing the system as cruel, says he has "no brief for or against it, nor any purpose save to try to tell the truth". He ends the article with the claim that the brutal collectivization campaign was motivated by the "hope or promise of a subsequent raising up" of Asian-minded masses in the Soviet Union which only history could judge.

Rather than just repeating the Stalinist viewpoint, Duranty often admitted the brutality of the Stalinist system and then proceeded to both explain and defend why dictatorship or brutality were necessary. In addition, he repeated Soviet views as his own opinion, as if his 'observations' from Moscow had given him deeper insights into the country as a whole.

In his praise of Stalin as an imperial, national, "authentically Russian" dictator to be compared to Ivan the Terrible, Duranty was in fact expressing views similar to those of many white emigres during the same period, echoing still earlier hopes by the Eurasianist and Mladorossi currents in the 1920s.

Stalin himself praised Duranty in 1933, saying that Duranty "(tried) to tell the truth about our country."

Reporting the famine

Main articles: Holodomor and Denial of the Holodomor

In 1932, reports of famine in Ukraine started appearing from journalists such as Gareth Jones of The Times and Malcolm Muggeridge of The Guardian. Both men defied travel restrictions and secretly went to view conditions in Ukraine. In the spring of 1933, Jones left the Soviet Union and reported the famine under his own name in the Manchester Guardian. Around the same time, six British citizens were arrested on charges of industrial espionage. On March 31, 1933, Walter Duranty denounced the famine stories and Gareth Jones in the New York Times. In the piece, he described the situation under the title "Russians Hungry, But Not Starving" as follows: "In the middle of the diplomatic duel between Great Britain and the Soviet Union over the accused British engineers, there appears from a British source a big scare story in the American press about famine in the Soviet Union, with 'thousands already dead and millions menaced by death from starvation."

English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who had secretly been in Ukraine for The Guardian, later called Duranty "the greatest liar I have met in journalism." But while Gareth Jones had published his articles under his own name, the Muggeridge articles were published in the Guardian without Muggeridge's name on them. Neither Muggeridge nor any other member of the press establishment covering the Soviet Union came to the public defense of Gareth Jones. And while Jones wrote letters supporting the unattributed articles in the Guardian, Muggeridge did not write similar articles to the New York Times supporting Jones.

In his New York Times articles (including one published on March 31, 1933), Duranty repeatedly denied the existence of a Ukrainian famine in 1932–33. In an August 24, 1933 article in NYT, he claimed "any report of a famine is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda", but admitted privately to William Strang (in the British Embassy in Moscow on September 26, 1933) that "it is quite possible that as many as ten million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year."

The duel in the press over the famine stories came at the same time as sensitive negotiations over establishing diplomatic relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. After relations were established in November 1933, a dinner was given for Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov in New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Walter Duranty was given such a prominent role in the dinner that Alexander Woollcott wrote, "Indeed, one quite got the impression that America, in a spasm of discernment, was recognizing both Russia and Walter Duranty."

Later career

Duranty left Moscow in 1934. Later in that same year, he visited the White House in the company of Soviet Officials including Litvinov. He continued as a special correspondent for the New York Times through 1940.

He wrote several books on the Soviet Union after 1940. He died in Florida in 1957.

Scholarship on Duranty's work

Duranty's work on the Soviet Union was done at a time when many respected it and its leadership. The Soviet Union's participation in the League of Nations was viewed optimistically. Even into WWII Joseph E. Davies, U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1936—1941, positively represented both "Russia and its people in their gallant struggle to preserve the peace until ruthless aggression made war inevitable" and Stalin as a "decent and clean-living" man and "a great leader."

Many reporters of Duranty's time slanted their coverage of the Soviet Union, either because the capitalist world was sinking under the weight of the Great Depression or out of fear of expulsion. Also, many editors found it hard to believe a state would deliberately starve millions of its own people. However, even with this to consider, Duranty's reports were the source of much frustration from Times readers during 1932, as his reports directly contradicted the paper's own editorial page.

While Duranty has been criticized more generally for deferring to Joseph Stalin's and the Soviet Union's official propaganda rather than reporting news from Moscow, the major controversy regarding his work is his reporting on the great famine of 1932—1933. Since the 1970s, Duranty's work has come under increasingly harsh fire for reporting there was no famine even while it was clear from his personal exchanges that he was fully aware of the scale of the calamity.

• Robert Conquest has written several books, starting in the 1970s including The Great Terror and Harvest of Sorrow which have been critical of Duranty's reporting from the Soviet Union.

• Sally J. Taylor wrote a book in 1990 called Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in Moscow (ISBN 0-19-505700-7). In a review of Taylor's book, Mark Y. Herring characterized Duranty as "the number one Useful Idiot for Lenin first, and later or Stalin.

• Political commentators such as Joe Alsop and Andrew Stuttaford have criticized Duranty.

• American engineer Zara Witkin (who worked in the USSR from 1932 to 1934) and UK intelligence have shown that Duranty knowingly misrepresented the famine.

Duranty has also been retrospectively criticized for defending Stalin's notorious show trials.

Calls for revocation of Pulitzer Prize

Criticism of Duranty's reporting on the famine led to a move to posthumously and symbolically strip him of his Pulitzer award he garnered in 1932, the year of the famine. (The Pulitzer in question did not involve the famine.) In response to Taylor's book, the Times assigned a member of its editorial board, Karl Meyer, to write a signed editorial regarding Duranty's work. In a scathing piece, Meyer said that Duranty's articles were "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper." Duranty, Meyer said, had bet his career on Stalin's rise and "strove to preserve it by ignoring or excusing Stalin's crimes." Four years earlier, in a review of Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow, former Moscow bureau reporter Craig Whitney wrote that Duranty all but ignored the famine until it was almost over.

In 2003, after the Pulitzer Board began a renewed inquiry, the Times hired Mark von Hagen, professor of Russian history at Columbia University, to review Duranty's work. Von Hagen found Duranty's reports to be unbalanced and uncritical, and that they far too often gave voice to Stalinist propaganda. In comments to the press he stated, "For the sake of The New York Times' honor, they should take the prize away." The Times sent von Hagen's report to the Pulitzer Board and left it to the Board to take whatever action they considered appropriate. In a letter accompanying the report, Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. called Duranty's work "slovenly" and said it "should have been recognized for what it was by his editors and by his Pulitzer judges seven decades ago." However, he said that revoking the award would be reminiscent of the Soviet practice of "airbrushing" history.

Ultimately, the board decided not to rescind the award because in their view, "there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case."

See also

• Lion Feuchtwanger
• Louis Fischer
• Gareth Jones (journalist)
• Malcolm Muggeridge

External links

Pulitzer Prize Articles by Walter Duranty

• "Red Russia of Today Ruled by Stalinism, Not Communism"
• "Socialism First Aim in Soviet's Program; Trade Gains Second"
• "Stalinism Shelves World Revolt Idea; To Win Russia First"
• "Industrial Success Emboldens Soviet in New World Policy"
• "Trade Equilibrium is New Soviet Goal"
• "Soviet Fixes Opinion by Widest Control"
• "Soviet Censorship Hurts Russia Most"
• "Stalinism Smashes Foes in Marx's Name"
• "Red Army is Held No Menace to Peace"
• "Stalinism Solving Minorities Problem"
• "Stalinism's Mark is Party Discipline"
• "The Russian Looks at the World"
• "Stalin's Russia Is An Echo of Iron Ivan's"

Books

(chronological)

• The Curious Lottery and Other Tales of Russian Justice. New York: Coward-McCann, 1929
• Red Economics. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1932
• Duranty Reports Russia. New York: The Viking Press, 1934
• I Write As I Please. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935
• Europe—War or Peace? World Affairs Pamphlets No. 7. New York: Foreign Policy Association and Boston: World Peace Foundation, 1935.
• One Life, One Kopeck—A Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937
• Babies Without Tails, Stories by Walter Duranty. New York: Modern Age Books, 1937
• The Kremlin and the People. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941
• USSR: The Story of Soviet Russia. New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1944
• Stalin & Co.: The Politburo, The Men Who Run Russia. New York: W. Sloane Associates, 1949

Periodicals

(contributor)

• ASIA Magazine, Volume XXXV, Number 11; November, 1935
• ASIA Magazine, Volume XXXVI, Number 2; February, 1936
• Redbook; March, 1928

Translations

• The Story of the Lafayette Escadrille.Told by its Commander, Captain Georges Thenault. Translated by Walter Duranty. Boston: Small, Maynard & Company (1921).

Literary Awards

(other than Pulitzer)

• O. Henry Awards, First Prize, 1928, for "The Parrot", appearing in Redbook, March 1928

References

• Muggeridge, Malcolm Winter in Moscow (1934)
• Conquest, Robert The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties (1968)
• Conquest, Robert, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986)
• Crowl, James W. Angels in Stalin's Paradise: Western Reporters in Soviet Russia, 1917-1937; A Case Study of Louis Fischer and Walter Duranty. Washington, D.C.: The University of America Press (1981), ISBN 0-8191-2185-1
• Taylor, Sally J. Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times Man in Moscow. Oxford University Press (1990), ISBN 0-19-505700-7

The Pulitzer Prize Controversy

• The section of articles regarding the campaign to revoke Walter Duranty's 1932 Pulitzer Prize
• The Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain — Duranty Protest Site
• The Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association (UCCLA) - W. Duranty Protest
• Ukrainian Congress Committee of America official site about Walter Duranty and Holodomor
• Zara Witkin's memoir of Soviet Russia, see pages 208-210
• Pulitzer Prize Board Statement on Walter Duranty's 1932 Prize
• Markian Pelech, "Critique of Sigvard Gissler's Statement on Walter Duranty's 1932 Pulitzer Prize"
• New York Times Statement About 1932 Pulitzer Prize Awarded to Walter Duranty
• Markian Pelech, "Walter Duranty's 1932 Pulitzer Prize Invalidated. The Pulitzer Board set the Standard"
• Markian Pelech, "Is the Pulitzer Board Clueless?"
• 2003 Observer article, "Ukrainians want pro-Stalin writer stripped of Pulitzer".